Abstract :
A study has been made of the tradeoffs among beam divergence, cavity stability, and power output of low-order transverse modes (i. e., TEM00, TEM*01, TEM10, etc.) in a high power argon ion laser. The radial intensity distribution and angular divergence of the actual active cavity modes and theoretical cavity modes are compared. The three lowest order transverse modes listed above diverge in free space at 1.1, 2.4, and 3.6 times the rate of a diffraction limited Gaussian beam having the same diameter at the 1/e2intensity points.
